2005: Dehradunfootball.com goes online

India's first website dedicated to city football, www.dehradunfootball.com, was launched here on Sunday. The website is a brainchild of two football lovers Rohit Goyal and Raju Gusain, joined by other two, LP Thapa and Nilesh Rana to revive the sporting history in the Doon Valley. The main aim of this web edition is to promote local football on the internet. Inaugurating the site, Aslam Khan, associate Vice President Indian Olympic Association said, " Its a great initiative to restore the glorious days of Doon Football. Such initiatives should be encouraged in other centers of India to take Indian football back into top of international arena".

Commenting on the project Rohit Goyal says, "Though football is popular in entire India but no city has so far hosted a website on soccer. Even in prominent football centers like Kolkata and Goa a website on city football does not exist .We are making this first effort." Lauding the move, Olympic silver medalist Rajyavardhan Rathore says, "Allow me to congratulate the www.dehradunfootball.com team for the excellent effort to promote football. Such is the kind of sporting spirit required in India." The site will is a part of www.soccernetindia group which also runs websites for famous clubs including Mohun Bagan and East Bengal.

The launched www.dehradunfootball.com contains history, clubs, oldest clubs, interview and other details of Dehradun football. Prominent historian Ramachandran Guha and Associate Vice President of the Indian Olympic Association Aslam Khan have written guest columns. Ramchandran Guha has minutely captured his friendship with legendry midfielder Ram Bahadur in his piece 'For country and club.' Aslam Khan makes sharp attack on the functioning of the football association in his write up 'Football administrators need to change attitude'. Expert football commentator Novy Kapadia,actor Tom Alter and prominent writer Ruskin Bond will be writing columns for the site.

Raju Gusain says, "Promoting Doon football on web is one of our core activities but we will be also organizing football promotion activities like exhibition matches, workshops/seminars for referees and coaches." The www.dehradunfootball.com kicks off its football promotion activities in the state capital by hosting a tour of the Mohun Bagan SAIL Football Academy (Durgapur, West Bengal). This tour is being jointly organized with the Dehradun District Football Association. The Mohun Bagan Academy will play three matches here from August 10 to 15. Any football team from Calcutta is visiting the state capital after a gap of 25 years.

The website lists the best ever Dehradun XI. Selected by legendary footballer Shyam Thapa the team consists of: Bir Bahadur (Captain), Ram Bahadur, Amar Bahadur, Bhupender Singh Rawat, Shree Bahadur, Narshingha Gurung, Kharolla Lallu, Shivraj Thapa, Ravinder Singh(Goalkeeper), Sant Bahadur and C.B Thapa. Gore Singh(Coach) and Mohd Aslam Khan (Manager).

While the top-15 selected by Bir Bahadur includes: Chandan Singh, KP Mamgain, Bhagwan Singh, Ram Bahadur, Sant Bahadur, Shree Bahadur, Puran Bahadur (Captain),Sukh Dev, Bhupender Rawat, Shyam Thapa, Amar Bahadur,Maj Dhan Bahadur, General (Retd.) PK Lehri, RavinderBorha and Khem Bahadur.

In addition, the site also contains exclusive interviews with legends of Dehradun football including Shyam Thapa. In interview to dehradunfootball.com, Shyam Thapa has expressed his interest in initiating development programs in the city to revive the local football scene with proposed coaching clinic in September. Hailing East Bengal’s signing of Dehradun boy Jatin Bisht, Thapa said, "Remember Jatin! The responsibility of saving sinking ship of Doon football lies heavily on you".

A book on Dehradun football will be launched in December by the group.

2008: Seeking out football photos of Doon: From Garhi Cantt to London

Rohit Goyal and I decided to host a website dedicated to Dehradun football, www.DehradunFootball.com, during 2005-06. To make the site comprehensive, useful and detailed, we began searching for old photographs associated with Dehradun Football.

With fellow journalist friend LP Thapa, we began searching for the photographs in every nook and corner of Garhi Cantt. We were successful in collecting historic photographs of the Gorkha Brigade 1966 and 1969 Durand Cup triumphs from individual collections. The pictures were located from rusty army boxes and from semi moth-eaten file covers. The Gorkha Military Inter College provided us the snaps of the school's Subroto Cup victories.

After having collected many rare pictures, our greed intensified! Most the photographs we had collected were of the 60s and 70s. Now, we wanted some early ones. We approached the British Library (London) and they provided us a list of four photographs. The oldest one was of 1915. To further this task, one of founding members Nilesh Rana approached Mahadev Semwal, who hosted www.uttaranchal.org.uk, offered to sponsor the historic photograph for our website.

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Three cheers, DehradunFootball.com completes one decade on web

2015: DehradunFootball.com completes one decade on web

Dehradun: How fast the times flies! It seems like yesterday when we launched India’s fist city football website, www.DehradunFootball.com. But, we have completed one decade of our operation Today (10 August 2015). In these bygone ten years we had a chance to access the actual hurdle in the progress of Indian football. India’s struggle in FIFA ranking is man-made and till the All India Football Federation finds out a practical way to reach out the grassroots, nothing magical should be expected. Minnows like Guam will continue to defeat us and every time after facing such humiliation we will find some so called genuine excuses to run away from our responsibilities.

When DehradunFootball.com was launched in 2005, we never had any idea that we will go this far. We just wanted to do some quick documentation work and some activates to run a rather static website. As we got deeply involved in Indian football, we found that some basic problem have turned cancerous after not getting treatment since a long time. We had little resources and despite this decided to raise our voice against the prevailing ills in Indian football. The Dehradunfootball.com filed a series of RTI application to the AIFF for gathering information related to governance and funding. We disclosed many new information through RTI to football lovers. Inspired many other to use RTI as a tool to curb corruption in sports..